


solidarity and solitude

by dopekanna



Series: Naruto AU Week 2021 [6]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Neglect, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:22:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29400477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dopekanna/pseuds/dopekanna
Summary: The war gave birth to many orphans.
Series: Naruto AU Week 2021 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2150949
Kudos: 19
Collections: Naruto AU Week 2021





	solidarity and solitude

**Author's Note:**

> Of all the works I did for this week, I think this one is my favorite.
> 
> additional TW: blood, physical violence, child neglect, mentions of murder

The war gave birth to many orphans.  
  
The boy that hovers around the market is one of them. His eyes are sky-blue and his skin is dark, like the people of the Water Tribes, but his hair is a bright straw-yellow. No one quite knows what to make of him. The other street orphans avoid him, call him monster, and throw rocks at him. The adults wonder where he came from, but then they wonder where all the street orphans came from anyways. Everyone knows he's a pickpocket though, so they shoo him away from their stalls with brooms and rocks.  
  
(Once upon a time, a little girl with hair like fire but a knack for summoning whirlpools met a boy who shouldn't have been possible.)  
  
Every now and then, an earthbending teacher will sense his potential as a bender and try to teach him. He can never get a pebble to so much as budge, and they soon kick him back out to the street. He watches the other students levitate rocks and punch through brick and wonders why he can't do what so many see in him. No one notices his shadow get a little larger, a little sharper in these moments.  
  
(Once upon a time, a man and a woman sealed away something that could've ended the war, because the end of the world was far, far worse.)  
  
The day the Fire Nation attacks, he flees faster than ever before, fire on his heels and smoke in his nose. He's not scared of the fire itself, no, that feels rather…familiar, for some reason. No, he’s deathly afraid of the soldiers with the skull masks and red helmets burning the town to the ground. He’s seen what they’ve done to other people; he’s seen the scars on the other children, the ones who ran away with their lives. He can't read, but he hears the adults tell everyone to go north to Ba Sing Se. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

\---

The war gave birth to many orphans.  
  
The boy that's sleeping in an abandoned Fire Nation tank is one of them. He keeps himself warm with little puffs of fire from his mouth and tries not to think about the past. It's very bloody and it makes his head hurt when he dreams.  
  
(Once upon a time, the Uchiha family ruled one of the oldest Fire Nation colonies in the Earth Kingdom, and Sasuke Uchiha was their youngest son.)  
  
He hears a commotion outside, so he pops open the roof hatch and looks out to the wasteland he's been wandering for a week. He has enough food and water for a while if he rations it well, but that plan goes out the window as soon as he sees a boy his age with yellow (!) hair being beaten bloody by some teenagers. One of them levitates a rock half the size of the tank and moves into the kata to launch it, and Sasuke knows it will be a killing blow if he doesn’t stop it _now_. He leaps out of the tank and lands behind of the bloody boy, grabbing him by the back of his shirt and hauling him out of the way just in time. Before the teenagers can get another attack in, Sasuke breathes out a giant fireball, aiming up to graze the kids’ heads.  
  
"Fire Nation!" the teenagers scream, and they run back to whatever camp they came from. Sasuke watches them run, then turns back to the boy he saved, bracing himself for a sucker punch because no one likes firebenders around these parts. Instead he gets tackled into a hug, and dirt gets in his mouth.  
  
"Thankyouthankyouthankyou!" the boy with yellow hair screams into his ear, and Sasuke is too shocked to tell him to keep it down. The boy is so, so warm, he hasn't had a hug since -  
  
Since –

(Once upon a time, Mikoto Uchiha gave her sons the best hugs, and her last one shielded her youngest from certain death).  
  
He doesn't know when he starts crying, but the other boy is there to cup his face and wipe away the tears.  
  
"Why were you in the tank?" the boy asks him, and Sasuke sniffles and wipes the snot away with a dusty hand.  
  
"Orphan. No one in Earth Kingdom would take in a firebending kid; they'd rather see me die."  
  
"Oh, you too?" the boy laughs, and Sasuke looks at him, confused.  
  
"Why? Because of your hair?" he asks, and the boy falters. Sure, Sasuke’s never seen anyone with yellow hair either, but is that really a good enough reason?  
  
"I don't know..." he says quietly, and that's when Sasuke notices the warmth around them, the whisker marks on the boy’s cheeks, the bruises and cuts healing way too fast, and he thinks he should be scared, but he sees instead just another lost boy. There is a commotion in the distance, and torches start to appear on the horizon.  
  
"I'd better get going," Sasuke says, and the boy looks back towards the oncoming lights. He looks panicked and tugs hard on Sasuke's threadbare shirt. It threatens to rip.  
  
"CanIcomewithyoupleaseIstoletheirfoodandI-"

"Of course, dobe, come help me get my stuff," Sasuke snaps. He sprints back to the tank, jumping up and diving into the hatch with a fire-boosted launch. The boy looks at him, and then snarls.  
  
"What’d you call me, teme?"  
  
Sasuke pokes his head out of the tank and chucks a burlap sack of dried food at him.  
  
"I called you ‘dobe’, do you need to get your ears checked?"  
  
"I'm gonna kick your butt, teme!" the other boy yells back, jumping up and down and flailing about, but somehow, he also manages to wrap the sack snugly around his back. Sasuke jumps down to the ground, takes the boy's hand before he can protest, and they run like the wind.  
  
Later that night (very early in the morning, actually), they lie under the stars and Sasuke asks his new friend what his name is.  
  
"I don't know," he says bluntly, "I don't know who my parents are, and no one's ever given me a name before. They just called me brat or boy or...demon."  
  
Sasuke looks at his new travel companion. He doesn't look very demonic. He also feels like the sun in some ways, like his family’s firebending did. He asks the boy if he's a bender, and gets a whine in response.  
  
"They always thought I had potential for it, but I can't earthbend."  
  
"What if it's because you can bend a different element?" Sasuke asks nonchalantly. There’s a good chance he’s a waterbender just on his looks alone, but that sun-warmth, that must be the Will of Fire his lǎoshī talked about. The boy's eyes twinkle like the stars.  
  
"So that's why they wasted my time!" he shouts, jumping up and down and dancing around their makeshift campsite. Sasuke groans, throws a piece of stale bread at him, and tells him to go to bed already. Ba Sing Se is far. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

\---

The war gave birth to many orphans.  
  
The girl with pink hair and eyes green as jade is not one of them, but in many ways she is. _Cursed_ , the ladies said when her mother birthed her, _spirit-touched_. _A changeling_ , her father hisses, _an omen of bad luck_ , the neighbors say. It doesn't help that she just sees things differently, sees a whole other world right beside her own. No one sees the monsters under their beds that whisper to her that Guó-xiānshēng from down the street drinks too much, the little forest children that rattle like wooden bells and bring her acorns that she keeps in a jar by her vase of flowers, the glowing blue faces of her father’s parents begging him to treasure their precious grandchild. Her mother loved her and named her Sakura after her favorite blossoms, but these days she is afraid of her daughter.

(Once upon a time, a woman sat under a cherry blossom tree and wished for a child.)

Sakura is mocked for her pink hair and her huge forehead by the other children, except for Ino who lives just outside of town at the Yamanaka flower shop, who has white hair and red eyes and doesn't go out because the sun hurts her skin. Not many people get to see Ino, but Sakura thinks Ino is the prettiest girl in the whole wide world, and they spend most of their days playing together. Ino is a waterbender, just like her mother, a traveling Water Tribe performer; her father stays at home and manages their flower shop. He loves his daughter and Sakura, and he is grateful that she keeps his daughter company, even if she says strange things sometimes like, “Shūshu, the dragonfly bunnies told me the irises need more water” or “Shūshu, the kitsune spirits won’t go back into the forest and they’ve been living in your shop for a week now”. Sakura helps him around the shop sometimes too, bending soil just the way he needs it, and he pays her well for her hard work. He's never seen an earthbender with such precise control, and he wonders what would happen if the king heard of a changeling earthbending prodigy.  
  
Nothing good, he thinks, because the royal court seems to only care about their games and trophies. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.  
  
Ino loves Sakura's stories of the spirit world and doesn't shy away from the scarier tales of spirits that steal faces and memories and whole families. She doesn't like to hear that Sakura can't seem to fit in, that her parents sometimes fight because they don't think she's their child. Ino wants to hug her forever and scream at the world for hating her Sakura. She has her father's eyes and her mother's smile – she knows this because she’s seen them all together as a proper family before – so how could everyone be so blind?

And then on Sakura's 12th birthday, the Fire Nation attacks, and the war gives birth to another orphan.  
  
Sakura is trapped between the charred bodies of her parents and saved from death at the flaming hands of a skull-faced soldier by two boys who somehow outmaneuver a grown man in hand-to-hand combat. One of them is a firebender of all things, and the other - the other is doing something, he’s bending but she can't tell what, but his aura is weird and yet she’s seen something similar before –

"Lord Kitsune," Sakura whispers, the true name of the malevolent god heavy and immovable on her tongue, but then she sees the fire all around her home, the body of the soldier falling unconscious the ground from a solid punch to the head by the boy with hair that glows orange in the fire.

"Ino, I need to get to Ino!" she screams, pulling the boys towards her with burned, stinging hands. They look at each other, then back at her and nod, and Sakura leads the way through the burning town to the flower shop surrounded by the earth walls she made and the gardens she helped grow and the soil she tilled and –

It's safe. The fire hasn't gotten here yet, but they’re creeping closer, and Shūshu and Ino are packing the last of their belongings and scrambling out the door. Sakura runs over to them, hugs them, and she says her goodbyes even though she doesn’t really know why. Shūshu protests, says she should travel with them, but Ino, shielded under her veiled hat, shakes her head at her father and points at the boy with hair as yellow as straw.

"He's the one the kitsune have been talking about, right? The whiskers make it really obvious," she says sadly, surely putting on a brave face, but Sakura hears her choke out a sob. "Sakura, I don't want you to go, please! What if I never see you again?"

"I'll find you again, Ino, I promise," she says, clutching her best friend’s hands and pushes past the pain screaming in her head, "I swear on all the spirits I've met that we'll meet again."

(Once upon a time, a spirit asked a woman to grant it a wish in return.)  
  
Ino nods, tears in her eyes and presses a fleeting kiss to Sakura's cheek. "I'll be counting on that." The fire is too close, too hot now and the Yamanakas must flee.

"Let's go!" the yellow-haired boy says, and he drags the firebender and Sakura behind him, going faster and faster ( _too fast,_ Sakura thinks) until they're out of the woods and Sakura has to bend an earth wall for them to slam into so they don’t run off the cliff. They hit the wall at full speed and slump to the ground in pain, but it saves their lives. When they get their bearings again, painfully, the firebender turns to his friend and grabs him by the collar.

"We agreed no a-" he shouts.

"It was an emergency!" the other boy yells petulantly.

Sakura doesn’t get what’s going on here, but she’s more interested at what she sees under the boy’s skin. There’s something boiling under his skin, acidic and vicious, and a bright scarlet red.

"Who sealed you, Kurama?" she whispers, pushing between the two boys and staring at the fox’s container. He scrunches his face in suspicion at her.

"Who's Kurama?"

"The fox spirit god that's been sealed inside you," Sakura says in awe, stroking one of his whisker marks, "You don't know what you are?" The other boy gently pulls her away from Kurama’s host.

"Seems we don't know a lot of things about the dobe. Would be nice to know someone who does," the firebender grunts, and Sakura looks at him thoughtfully. Who would know about what happened to this boy…

Her eyes light up when she realizes who would.

"Why don’t we ask the spirit sealed in him?”

\---

(Once upon a time, a fox god met three very strange children in his prison.

\---

"So...let me get this straight," Aang says, rubbing his temples. He points at Sasuke.

"You're fourth in line to the Fire Nation throne _at worst_ , and Fire Lord Ozai, who is technically _your uncle_ , killed your family because he thought your dad was going to stage a coup, take over the Fire Nation, and end the war." Sasuke nods. Aang points at Sakura.

"You're a reincarnated cherry blossom spirit, you can see spirits and enter the spirit world at will, and your control over earthbending is so good that you can bend _individual grains of sand_ with no problem even though you're not one of those guys." Aang angrily gestures to the unconscious sandbenders that Appa is not so gently sleeping on. Sakura nods. Aang points to the last of the trio.

"Your parents sealed an all-powerful fox spirit inside you in order to stop the end of the world, and they did this because your _airbender dad_ _traveled back in time_ to stop someone from manipulating said fox spirit into causing the apocalypse," Aang sighs, "and they also named you 'fishcake'."

"HEY!" Naruto shouts and jumps up, pointing an accusing finger at the Avatar. Everyone around the campfire snickers a little, even Sasuke and Sakura.

"It's a good name!" Sokka pipes up, still snickering a little, "Loads of Water Tribe people are named after fish! Your mom had the right idea, why not go one step further? " Naruto growls and readies a swirling air blast in his palm.

"Don't put out the fire, Naruto, I'm cold," Sakura groans. Sasuke tugs Naruto back down onto their blanket and the three of them huddle together for warmth in the cold desert night.

Toph whistles. "They’re crazier than us, Twinkletoes. Can we keep them?" Aang groans, but he's smiling.

The war gave birth to many orphans, but they're not alone anymore.


End file.
